Re: Updated again: "Web Accessibility is Smart Business" Presentation

Hi Rob,

To reiterate the context of the quote, I did not include it because it
was Peter's opinion alone, I included it because a member of the team
that worked on the redevelopment at L&G, who had access to the numbers
(see the other slide I referenced), felt it summed up the results.

Even though you are probably correct in your analysis of the quote in
the context of Robert's post alone, I think this takes it from
anecdotal to an eloquent expression of the outcome that the developers
involved derived from the numbers at their disposal. See it as a quote
from the people involved that just happened to be written by someone
else!

Maybe we need to include the numbers from Mike Davies slide deck to
support the claim. If this would solve the problem people have with
its inclusion I am happy to ask Mike for permission to use his slide
on EOWG's behalf.

Regards,

Ian.

On 11 April 2011 15:31, Robert Yonaitis <ryonaitis@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I think Peter (Abrahams) accurately writes about what he "believes",
> However, This slide deck is a educational piece and while many accessibility
> experts have total faith in the assessments that does not make the
> assertions fact as presented. I have worked in Accessibility and A11y
> Education and Outreach for over a decade and it strikes me that when we lead
> with our faith & beliefs on a education / outreach piece we leave more to be
> explained then learned. While we can discuss this stuff it is not something
> that we should present as fact, unless we have facts.
>
> I remember talking to a friend in Madrid, William (Loughborough), and he
> noticed no old people going into the Prado. Based on this he identified that
> this should lead us to more research, anecdotal evidence is not bad it
> should get us thinking, we identified some bad things and some good things
> and if I know William he then presented his ideas to the museum. So please
> do not think I believe Anecdotal evidence is bad - in fact it does get us
> thinking, innovating and should be a starting point for more research. So
> when thinking of this article, that Peter wrote, think of a graduate
> research paper. If you delivered that article as a research paper you would
> not do very well as there are no sources and it stresses faith versus fact.
>
> William discussed a council of elders and I wonder if that ever happened at
> the W3C  as it would have been a good thing. I think from this slide deck
> there also may be anecdotal evidence that the group can benefit from non
> A11y business people contributing. There would have a different take on the
> slides. The slides lean heavily toward business terms but does not rise to
> the level of business data that a CEO/Business Unit Leader would need to
> make a decision. In business meetings or when presenting to a board you peer
> through every slide and you think of what slide will allow them to dismiss
> the idea, how many of these slides would give someone the excuse to dismiss
> the entire presentation until there was more data?
> In the end I do believe there should be a central goal to this slide deck,
> "do no harm" perhaps everything this groups does should lean toward this
> lofty goal. The information presented should be beyond question and it
> should grow the belief, based on facts, in developing accessible (to people
> that do not currently do so or are on the fence) and never contribute to the
> people who come up with reasons to ignore the moral and social need, in my
> opinion, to make their content and applications accessible.
> As I said in a previous mail I believe the slide deck is a tweak or two away
> from achieving what I assumed its goals were. I just wanted to make sure
> that I was very clear on why I disagreed with the use of the anecdotal data.
> If we believe this Anecdotal information is so important perhaps we need to
> assign a research team to get together real data, write a paper and submit
> it to peers on ACM (http://www.acm.org/) to get it properly vetted and
> published so we can refer to it. Again, thank you for your time.
> Cheers,
> Rob Yonaitis
> http://www.facebook.com/yonaitis
>
>> All of these statistics are excellent and can be seen to have a direct
>> effect on the profitability of Legal & General which far outweighed
>> the expenditure and demonstrate excellent return-on- investment (ROI).
>> Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research
>>
>> Unless we want a debate about separation of 'accessibility' and
>> 'usability' (and I hope we don't!) I think that the stats justify
>> including the reference in this presentation.
>

Received on Monday, 11 April 2011 22:35:49 UTC